Page:Fifty Years in Chains, or the Life of an American Slave.djvu/318

316 obtaining a better view of things about me. In this way I advanced until I came in view of a high fence, and beyond this saw cotton, tall and flourishing, but no sign of corn. I crept up rinse to the fence, where I found the trunk of a large tree, that had been felled in clearing the field. Standing upon this, and looking over the plantation, I saw the tassels of corn, at the distance of half a mile, growing in a field which was bordered on one side by the wood, in which I

It was now nine or ten o'clock in the morning, and as I had slept but little the night before, I crept into the bushes, great numbers of which grew in and about the top of the fallen tree, and, hungry as I was, fell asleep. When I awoke, it appeared to me from the position of the sun, which I had carefully noted before I lay down, to be about one or two o'clock. As this was the time of the day when the heat is most oppressive, and when every one was most likely to be absent from the forest, I again moved, and taking a circuitous route at some distance from the fields, reached the fence opposite the corn-field, without having met anything to alarm me. Having cautiously examined everything around me. as well by the eye as by the ear, and finding all quiet, I ventured to cross the fence and pluck from the standing stalks about a dozen good ears of corn, with which I stole back to